Healthy Additives For Your Blog

I like to keep track of what is happening to my blog outside of the what I personally put into it. With the following tools, I can do just that, and increase my readership as well. Below are a few of the tools I use to work the magick.

I recently wrote about Gather.com and how I use the free social networking service to both drive traffic to my blog and earn money with my posts. I won't cover that again here, but it is an effective tool.

Then there is the Social bookmarking maker which I can use for a good many of the social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and digg. It is a code that is installed in your blog's template that automatically places the code (whichever you choose in either drop-down menu or list format) for the post-specific links into each post automatically.

I have talked before about Technorati and how it has assisted me in better tracking my stats and the links to my blog, but it always helps to have ways for people to search out your blog as well. With Blake's Technorati tag creator I can do just that, adding search tags to each post individually with a minimum of fuss. I have to open up an additional page when I am writing a post, but it is well worth it for the time saved.

Blogrolling.com is another great way to do social bookmarking and find out who has bookmarked your blog in a way that is not tracked by any other service. While I do not display my blogroll on my blog, I do have one on a private page on my desktop that I refer to that displays those sites that do not have a feed.

RSS or ATOM feeds. You need these, seriously. The new rage in keeping up with oft-refreshing media sources like blogs, weather, and news are "feeds". A feed sends the content directly to a centralized location or "feed reader" such as Google homepage. There are many other readers out there, I just can't recall any specifics at the moment. Most blogging platforms now have a button to turn on your feed such as Blogger, and many others just provide a feed automatically, like LiveJournal. Honestly, I look at the items on my feed list a lot more often than I do the ones on my blogroll or social bookmarks. Very easy to use, very important to have.

Google Analytics I've also talked about before, and I have found it to literally be the most effective and thorough stat tracking program on the market today. Allowing you to track multiple sites with the same account is only the first of it's many perks, however, those with slower connections may want to click out of the first page and move to other, less graphic intensive pages for faster information tracking as the "map overlay" takes quite some time to load. Still, I'd be completly in the dark without it.

Feedburner is a vital tracking device for your web feed, as it allows you to check the stats on who is subscribing and how many hits your feeds get. Truly, it is a beautiful thing.

Tags: Google Analytics track multiple sites Blogger livejournal LJ google homepage google rss atom feed feedburner feeds web feed blogrolling blogroll blog roll technorati technorati link generator social bookmark social bookmarking social bookmarking maker social link link bookmark template gather additive blog blogger blogging optimization optimize